getting into space means getting off the earth first!

It is a good question to ask if humanity is stable
enough to bottle up in a space habitat or if the bad
habits will just fester. Is this where can man boldly
go or not? You can take a man out out of the trailer
park but can you take the trailer park out of the man?

It is my assertion that space has none of the
traditional reasons to fight over namely security. In
a famine prior to the 20th century, poverty was a
death sentence. This makes people really prone to all
sorts of violence.

Granted there were some hiccups in WW 1 & 2 that
showed economic vitality and racism are still factors,
it remains that the world is far more peaceful now and
the risk of starvation outside of some parts of Africa
and Asia is virtually nil.

Space by definition requires massive infrastructure
and tight coordination. Only by deliberate action
would someone in space face an insecurity not due to
the environment. There is no weather to spoil crops
nor lack of sunlight for power. Only the deeply
disturbed would be a threat to anybody and that is an
issue of mental health which is largely ignored on
earth.

Cheers, Thor

"I'm sure there will be centralized control and
legislation and authority for
a long time, but the emergence of conflicting
interests as space based
population and markets expands will eventually lead to
a much less organized
and much more varied and unstable situation.
FWIW being an old cynic I expect that the colonization
of space will allow
the human race to return to their favourite pastime:
slaughtering each
other."

"I have a hard time imagining that people would be
allowed this much freedom"

"once the infrastructure is in orbit, there
could be more freedom, but it seems that space is such
a dangerous environment that social upheaval must be
more civil and less violent, or
else it would be too deadly. Also, would any one else
feel like a sitting duck to some extremist group that
wants to shoot liberals out of the sky?"